“Colorize To Remember”: Samir Belhamra Colorized Historic Images To Bring The Past To Life

Samir Belhamra is a self-taught photographer and graphic designer, based in France. We recently published his amazing photographs of the South of France. Today we present his new project “Colorize To Remember” in which he colorized old classic photos.

More: Samir Belhamra, Instagram

According to Samir: “Since 1 week now I started colorization of old photos and I can’t litteraly stop doing this. It’s so inspiring, fascinating.. and breathtaking to make old photos alive again. We live every moments and we try to understand what the people on the photo are doing, or thinking.. I done 1 to 2 colorization per day, here is some before and after. I named this series “Colorize to Remember”.

With an image editing software, a colorized photo can very easily be set to black and white. By applying a filter on the whole picture and at the price of some retouches, the rendering can be quite satisfactory. The opposite is less obvious: how do you know which color palette to apply? One can certainly guess by experience, but the colorization itself is tedious.

The first print of image may get an old look or destroyed. Photos can be damaged for many reasons. By the time old photos become faded & eventually destroyed. But you can regain this photos by taking our damaged photo restoration service. Bring the past and save it for future.

Mostly Historical black and white photos can be victims of stains, scratches and time. But you can use Photoshop to restore these images to their original glory. Color is the life of a photo. Restore the color of old images from your album, which becomes faded. We can litteraly regain the lost color of all photos.

I made it this night. I decided to try old photos colorizations today, after watching some good works about some people on reddit. Here is the result of my two attempts. Any advice, tips or feedback are welcome. Thanks by advance

(I used Photoshop only, and try to imagine by myself what the colors must look, without any reference)”